


One Night

by bloodandsteel



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Love Confessions, M/M, Pining, sad Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 21:43:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3666282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodandsteel/pseuds/bloodandsteel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Probably he says it because he’s been awake for more than seventy hours and he’s spent the entire night trying to memorize the warm body of the man next to him."<br/>OR<br/>Steve is in love with a dead man who gives him one night</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Night

**Author's Note:**

> My first work on AO3, however I've been writing for a while. This has been in my drafts so I decided I might as well post it. It might have another chapter added (something happy no doubt) I hope you enjoy, I did cry whilst writing it. If you have any criticism please share, I write to help share emotions after all.

He is bone deep tired, the type that makes your entire body ache and collapsing on the floor seem like a good idea. He stumbles through the apartment, not bothering with lights as he gets a glass out of the cabinet and turns the faucet on cold, leaning heavily against the counter as it reaches the temperature he deems appropriate. Chugging cold water feels like heaven and the only thing he can imagine better is getting into his bed (the new one, the one that is stiff and not cushy like he’s about to sink right through). He sets the glass into the sink and turns, eyes dull. 

Not very much light filters in to reach the kitchen, the thin amount from the green light of the numbers barely allowing him to see the other appliances, but they do illuminate something shiny. Steve blinks as the pieces of vision fit together, creating a figure, a man with a metal arm. 

Bucky- The Winter Soldier. He’s tired, oh so tired and can’t stop the sound the leaves his lips, still wet from the water, a sound like a sigh-sob. Bucky.

He knows, deep in his brain, he knows that he should be afraid, that he shouldn’t take a step closer just to let his eyes adjust to the darkness and make out his face. Bucky’s face, hardened with cold features and stubble lining his jaw, a hood up but the left sleeve ripped off, dark hair framing the sickly pale pallor of his skin.

He takes another step and lifts a hand, touching just the fabric of the black hoodie, wanting to know that Bucky is actually here. Lose enough sleep and visions of what you want most can haunt you like ghosts. But his fingers don’t fall through, skin warmed fabric is right under his fingers which he quickly draws back, not afraid, just scared that any wrong move and he’ll leave. 

“Bucky,” his voice cracks. He doesn’t care.

“The dog down the street, Roofus. George who’d corner you for the money your ma gave you to go to the corner store. I-” his voice does an odd thing, the monotone breaking away to expression. Steve can feel tears gathering, he’s so tired and he never wants to sleep. “I smoked but then stopped because you coughed so much and I worried,” his words have more inflection, not quite Bucky but not the Winter Soldier. Steve’s chest hurts. 

“Buck,” he takes another step closer, Bucky’s eyes flick up to his, eyes narrowing in a calculating sort of way. “Please,” it’s a broken word, a word of a desperate man. Bucky’s face changes suddenly, pain rearranging his features into less of a mask and more of a man. Steve wants nothing more in the world then too take the last step and hold him, hold him until the clock stops ticking and the world is gone, fallen around them.

“Tonight,” his words sound like an oath, nothing more, nothing less. Tonight. Steve will take anything. He does not take the extra step because he is a coward. All those years ago, falling from the train, he should’ve followed his friend, his best friend, Steve is a coward. Bucky deserves more than a coward. 

Slowly, as to not spook him, because the painful expression on his face is crushing what’s left of his heart, he brings his left hand forward, offering it to the metal corresponding one. Those blue eyes, the blue eyes that have crowded his dreams for so long, look down, his expression changes again, becomes a bit more guarded. Somehow that’s more painful. But he takes the proffered hand in his own

Steve doesn’t take his eyes off of Bucky, not because he’s afraid but because he can’t believe. It’s been a long, long time. He wants to memorize every plane, every angle, every curve. He only has one night, after all.

Neither of them flick the lights on in the bedroom, Bucky simply flops on the bed in a way that’s so painstakingly a flash of who he was before, Steve’s lungs are perfect but he can’t breathe as he sits on top of the covers next to the man. His hood has fallen down, pooling at his shoulders, showing in perfect detail the dark circles and shadows and absolute pain of memories and memories. Steve knows that to get to the good ones he also would have to remember the ones of murder, the ones of being Hydra’s weapon. He wants his best friend back, but it’s not Steve who has to pay the price of memory. 

He wants to touch his face, feel the stubble, but he is still afraid that the dream will crumble into dust. One night. Instead his eyes, perfectly adjusted to the dark, study every detail, all his sketches were so wrong, details are different or remembered incorrectly, the curve of his bottom lip was always much fuller than he remembered, his eyebrows arched in a different place then in his books. Bucky looks at him back, his expression unreadable, but Steve is okay with that, he has- has to memorize everything because he cannot live another moment with Bucky. 

After committing every angle and curve and plane of his pale face Steve’s eyes move to his neck, the adams apple and the straight line from his jaw to his jugular. His eyes stop at the metal of the zipped up hoodie, but he doesn’t dare remove it, doesn’t dare touch. Instead his eyes move to the metal arm, at the faded red star, at the perfect way the joints move just like his real arm. He wants to see the flesh and blood one as well, but he wouldn’t dare ask. 

Steve is tired. He doesn’t notice as he starts drooping, falling towards the pillows, fascinated by Bucky’s long hair. He had always kept it short, styled. Steve would watch him put the pomade in it, slick it up in the front if he was going out to the many bars he’d sometimes drag Steve too. 

But it’s long now and Steve wants to draw it, draw the shadows it creates. His face is on the pillows but his hand, oddly pale in the wane light filtering in from the streetlights and the blinds, reaches to almost caress the greasy strands. But he does not touch. Time passes and they both sag onto the pillows, no words spoken. Steve memorizes Bucky’s face, his shadowed eyes, he memorizes the body beneath the clothes, using his own memories to supply what he can imagine to be muscle and pale, flat planes. He thinks about the scars Bucky definitely has and his heart hurts, his chest seizing. 

In his effort to get close enough to study his face Steve pillowed his face on Bucky’s chest in a way that felt like a memory. So familiar because in the winter it was what they’d do, two bodies generate more heat than one. But it’s not winter and Steve has only one night. The black sweatshirt smells of sweat and gasoline.

Probably he says it because he’s been awake for more than seventy hours and he’s spent the entire night trying to memorize the warm body of the man next to him. Through the cheap blinds a thin amount of light is starting to interfere with the darkness Steve has gotten used to. 

His eyes are drooping as he lay half on Bucky’s chest, the other man propped up on the headboard staring straight ahead, but it’s not the blank look on his face, or the one that means he’s planning, the two faces of the Winter Soldier. It’s also not the face of a man tired and loopy from drinking, or grinning as he thinks of the next embellished story to tell, the faces Steve remembers the best from his Bucky. It’s a faraway face placed right in that moment, arranged the features that are scattered in sketchbooks, tattooed in his brain. Bucky-This Bucky (because this could never be his Bucky)- is thinking and Steve is going to fall asleep and when he wakes up Bucky will be gone, taking another piece of Steve’s heart along with him.

So he says it because there can’t be any more harm done to the broken bits of his life, because there aren’t consequences in your mind when you’re half asleep and thoroughly tormented by the ghost of your past. 

“I love you, Buck,” his voice is croaky, the words hit the black fabric of the sweatshirt that Bucky didn’t bother to remove. Once they are said he doesn’t want to stay awake, doesn’t want to know if the words would make Bucky leave or if the man laying next to him will end his life (maybe he wouldn’t care so much, if he did). So he drifts. 

Warm memories, not specific, because when you’re that tired there is nothing specific, but leaves shading his blue eyes, the way he’d drape an arm across Steve’s thin shoulders and pull him close because Steve longed to be touched in a way that wasn’t a right hook, they all surround Bucky, his sleeping face in their shabby apartment, his face splitting grin, the way he’d charm his way up any woman’s skirt with just a few words that Steve could pretend were meant for him.

“I know,” it’s stark, because Steve was just about to plunge into unconsciousness and the only other sounds were the cars passing the street below, because he can feel the vibration of the words on his cheek. And when he looks up at Bucky’s profile there isn’t any anger, just the look of a man lost in thought, not the smug grin that would’ve accompanied those words any other time before, not anything other than this Bucky, the man who Steve has yet to know yet knows better than himself. 

They are the last thing he hears, the last sight is bits of light from the rising sun hitting the blue of his eyes and making the dark circles and thick lashes that much more dark. Steve loves him, he has loved him forever, but Bucky doesn’t want forever, so when Steve wakes up (twelve hours of darkness and sleep, it’s nighttime again) there is no trace of the only person Steve has ever loved. The black sweatshirt is draped over the back of his desk chair. Steve does not cry, his heart is gone and emotion has fled, leaving only the black sweatshirt that might still smell of a dead man


End file.
